CintaNotes, etc (meow!)

Posted by 22111
Oct 30, 2022 at 10:05 PM

If I was on Twitter - in fact, I never was -, I’d have twittered recently, “Maker of very bad spy cars (but which are brilliant at spying indeed!) denasifies Twitter - irony aside, dear Ely, couldn’t you buy German wikipedia, too?” - That being said, my old friend… well: ultimate idol! - Laura Black already knew he would be a stunner, and not only with the girls… 3 years before he was born, proof on file: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve6PSCUOYvE

I’ve spent my Sunday afternoon, “trialing” (in fact, I own some give-away v. 3.11 of it, so I’m not sure if the term “trial” really applies, over a simple “try out”...) CintaNotes, the “active development” isn’t precisely to be termed “frenetic” to say the least, and I was quickly down to giving up, all the more so since the help file is just a very long loo roll, form-wise, and the visual aspect of the UI is quite basic, but then, I remembered our U.S. history prof., I can’t remember his pen name currently, sorry, something like “weep” or similar, had said he had used it for some time, for serious work, before, finally, encountering some scaling problems though, and that, well, motivated me to READ that help file: oh, my! Let me say it’s some really good stuff, even though for me, tagging-based software isn’t what I need, but that’s just me.

From the tag tree and the context menu, right-click triggered by my mouse over there, I had wrongly inferred that there was only Boolean AND…

and that gave me the idea to share with all those of the developers out there who, marketing-wise, are not really musk, or sometimes even outright bad:

Use your context menus - specific according to the currently active screen element that is - to INFORM the (prospective) user, too, i.e. also add some additional, non-clickable entries, giving hints… which, in case, will absolutely DELIGHT people who otherwise would probably never ever have found out what they’d miss, pronto presto clearing your tool from their SSD…

In CintaNotes’ case, those tag sidebar menu entries would have been:

click/+click/^click: AND
+click: OR*
!click: NOT
+!click: no children
see search bar

*= I know this is contradictory, but it’s like this in the help file, and I’m too tired to untangle

And then, additional context menu entries for the search would have been:

a b|c -d: a and (b or c) but not d
for tags: by dropdown

And yes, after having used such commands for some weeks, the tool could display a dialog, “Do you want these hints to be hidden from now on?”...

Also of interest in the help file: “Tag Hierarchy”, “Notebooks”, “Sections”...

I have recently integrated two of my UR databases, combined weight in one now 3 GB, and some 70,000 items, and I have created hundreds of “standard” “sub-folders”, to be formatted (so that it’s evident that they are “standard” folders, linked to some specific “gathering” folders-of-folders, for alternative “compound views”), and linked into other sections (in UR, you can search for title key words e.g., then select just the pertinent results in the result list, then link them to a common target in bulk, that’s very fast, easy and faultless)...

And wherever, in multiple locations, I work on those sub-trees, I always work on the original data, ditto for additions: proven by them always getting the original path info (called “lineage” in UR)...

This is a high quality work environment, and whilst I suppose it’s technically feasible to turn hierarchical tag trees upside down, alternatively - which CintaNotes doesn’t do yet -, I currently don’t imagine tag-based systems being as powerful as folder-based systems… IF the latter come with perfect transclusion, as UR indeed does.

At the end of the day, in a tag system, you’ll have to (multiply in case…) tag every single item (even if more often than not you’ll do it in bulk indeed), whilst the above-described transclusionary folder system allows for just creating “natural” siblings “as they come”, within their “natural”, “primary” environment… and then you’ll link the whole group (which may be some neatly ordered sub-tree even) to any other, secondary, tertiary… position within the whole tree (universe): wherever it may also be “in (alternative) context”...

In other words, folders-with-“clones” preserve the “group integrity” of the sub-parts of your data / work, whilst tagging tends to isolate the items, even discarding them from their most intimate, original contexts: In the folder system, “real siblings”, even “families” stay together, and in their natural (i.e. manual) order; in tag systems, they are torn apart, split up, then artificially grouped together again, together with, and even then separated by, “foreign” elements, by tag systems’ strictly technical ordering criteria: alphabetical, by creation date, and so on.

Thus, again, I think I can bring some valid arguments for (multi-dimensional: that’s the c.s.q.n. indeed) folders, over tag-based system, and as said before, additional tags, coded into the item / file titles, for additional “dimensions”, instead of again multiplying the (virtual) “tree positions”, may often be indicated, just as my additional m_Grusin (in The Fabulous Baker Boys) or ph_Nykvist (in some Bergman films) tags for exceptional film music or photographic direction.

But for people who “function” with general (i.e. exclusive) tagging, CintaNotes’s realization of that paradigm could obviously be a very serious contender…

This being said, the aforementioned scaling problem could then stop some from adopting this particular tool in its current state, but that’s perhaps also the reason its developer has been working for some quite some time now on his exceptional tool?

( For Boolean search in UR, see https://www.kinook.com/Forum/showthread.php?p=22803 - it’s powerful but realized in some really awkward way - no comparison with “Everything”‘s wonderful SDK solution that is…)

Whilst Adobe has now enlarged their subscription model to Pantone shades used in their rent tools even - I seriously think that Cook himself could learn from’em -: Did you know Hollywood Stars, in their posh trailers on the lot, repeat tongue twitters, pardon, twisters, in frenetic cadence, and in order to free their jaw? Yes, you certainly knew that, but here’s their most recent try you didn’t know already:

Must Trump trust Musk Must Trump trust Musk Must Trump trust Musk Must Trump trust Musk (etc. etc.)

(Oh, and I had left out the aGrep (no iWhat equivalent, so sorry!) specific that your search target is a combination out of folder (!) and suffix (!... well, it’s a real grep then!), not file, and then, with just your thumb, you both select folder and suffix, also in combination… which, in the case of three distinct DBs, just means, you create 3 sibling folders, put file b.txt into folder b, file c.txt into folder c, and file d.txt into folder d, then select folder b, c OR d, and will get results just from the file in question - it seems some Linux greps function similarly…)